Question

I was wondering if there were a simple way to open a second terminal to display data. So I have a program running in a terminal, and I was wondering if it’d be possible for that program to open a second terminal to which I could output information for the user to read (leaving the other terminal alone).

Answer 1

Okay, I don’t know what operating system you’re using or what’s your console of choice, but on my Ubuntu 12.10 installation this opened up an xterm window with my results:

a = "Hello World!"

system(%Q[xterm -hold -e /bin/bash -l -c "echo #{a}"])

As for an explanation:

• -hold prevents the window from closing as soon as the program executes.
• -e specifies what program and its arguments are to be run (the /bin/bash ... part.).
• /bin/bash invokes the unix shell bash
• -l makes bash act as if it had been invoked as a login shell
• -c will receive console output
• echo displays a message on the screen.

Check the man pages for xterm and bash for more information.

If you add more details, perhaps we can clarify a better answer although, truthfully, I prefer Sergio’s answer of outputting to a file and having another console tailing that file.